Southern California -- this just in

28-foot sculpture of dog urinating shakes up Newport museum

March 1, 2013 | 3:03
pm

In the 1970s, Mad Magazine published a classic
cartoon depicting an amusement park called Get-It-Out-Of-Your-System-Land,
which offered a series of booths allowing visitors to unload their basest
urges: defacing classic paintings, burning books, smashing rare violins and the
like.

The park didn't include an opportunity to create a mess in a major art
museum, but that's what the Orange County Museum of Art is basically offering
as part of "Ain't Painting a Pain," its chaotic new show by Richard
Jackson.

From now until March 10, the museum will accept reviews of Jackson's show,
with the writer of the wittiest commentary getting to take part in a new piece
later in the month.

The work, titled "Do It Yourself Painting (Still Life)," will be
created by rigging a machine with electric fans and using it to splatter paint
around part of the lobby. The contest's winner gets the honor of turning on the
machine.

Does that qualify as creating or destroying? The two themes intertwine
constantly in Jackson's work.

"It's a different way to extend painting to make it something different
and kind of contemporary, where it's not this object that we have to take care
of after it's over," he said. "It's about destruction. It's about
throwing things away when you're finished. I see my things as evidence of an
event. Most of the time, people aren't around when I execute these
things."

Evidence plays a key role in many of Jackson's installations, as viewers are
invited to survey the scene and determine how what ended up where.

To create one piece in his show, the artist filled a remote-controlled model
airplane with paint and rammed it into a wall, leaving splashes of color and
shards of machinery on the floor. Another, titled "Painting With Two
Balls," was created by pouring paint over a pair of spinning spheres
attached to the engine of a car; the result turned the surrounding floor and
walls into a massive drip painting.

Oh, and then there's the peeing dog. Outside the museum, a massive
fiber-and-steel canine sculpture lifts its leg above the wall, with a trickle
of dried yellow paint indicating what it, well, got out of its system. It goes
without saying that the 28-foot pooch is a favorite of children who visit the
museum.

"That's a big part of what Richard does with his work," said
museum Director Dennis Szakacs. "He takes the idea of painting, which is a
rectangle confined by a frame, hanging on a wall, and he turns it into
something that is room scale or that is sculptural, completely changing the
nature of how you experience a painting and how a painting is made."

That Jackson uses scale as part of his art becomes increasingly apparent as
one ventures through "Ain't Painting a Pain"; the show, according to
its press kit, is the first ever by a living artist to occupy the museum's
entire exhibition space.

Some of Jackson's installations take up entire rooms, and in some cases, the
room itself becomes part of the art: One floor is made up of interlocking puzzle
pieces, while a piece titled "1,000 Clocks" surrounds the viewer with
simultaneously moving clocks, even on the ceiling.

The show marks the first career retrospective for Jackson, who was born in
Sacramento and launched his art career in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. After
it closes in Newport Beach, it will move on to venues in Germany and Belgium.

The ideas will pass on, anyway. Some of Jackson's pieces, like the clocks,
can be packaged and set up elsewhere; in other cases, the works will give way
to the broom and mop when the exhibit ends, and the machines will have to
re-splatter paint at the next stop. But even if many of Jackson's current works
die with the end of the Newport Beach show, he's fine with that.

"The objects themselves, I don't revere them, especially my own,"
he said. "I just don't think it's modern to archive and collect and keep
all this stuff. There's too much of it being made, and there's no place for it,
really. There's no place for all the work that's being made."

Richard
Jackson's "Bad Dog" uses the Orange County Museum of Art's building as
part of the act showing the dog urinating on the wall.
(DON LEACH, Daily Pilot / February 28, 2013)
- See more at:
http://www.dailypilot.com/entertainment/tn-dpt-0301-richard-jackson-dog-20130228,0,3640016.story#sthash.t6iFnAcy.dpuf

Photo: Richard Jackson's "Bad Dog" uses the Orange County Museum of Art's building as part of the act, showing the dog urinating on the wall. Credit: Don Leach/Times Community News, Feb. 28, 2013)